Je n'ai aucune idea comment cela se trouve la

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 2, 1997

THE PROBLEM with foreign language phrase books is that once you've looked up a phrase, mumbled it under your breath a few times and finally gotten up the nerve to blurt it out to a stranger, he immediately ruins your little triumph by saying something right back to you.

Last year, bleary-eyed and bedraggled from a trans-Atlantic flight, I stood at the ticket window of the Lisbon train station and uttered my carefully rehearsed sentence: "Queria dois bilhetes segunda classe para Coimbra." I wanted two second-class tickets to Coimbra.

What the man said back, and I'm quoting this as well as I can remember it, was "Bacalhau sapatos breagha pequeno almoco Ferdinand Magellan alguma coisa?" Translation: Your guess is as good as mine.

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Even if I could have flipped the pages of my little phrase book fast enough to find the first word - and I couldn't even come close - there was the matter of pronunciation. With so many of its "s" sounds enunciated like "sh" or

"z," Portuguese sounds to me like Spanish being spoken by Foster Brooks. I couldn't make out a word.

Nevertheless, I have spent many delightful hours poring over phrase books, of which we have a sizable library here at The Examiner. They're fascinating windows into other cultures - and often into the idiosyncrasies of those who produce them.

Why in the world, I wondered, would my Finnish phrase book contain the sentences, Mita taalla voi tehda iltaisin? Onko taalla yhtaan diskoa? These translate as: "What's there to do in the evening? Are there any discos?" The Finns have many fine qualities, but try as I might, I just can't picture them getting down on the dance floor to the soundtrack of "Saturday Night Fever."

For sheer amusement, though, my two favorites are Rick Steves' French phrase book and Lonely Planet's USA phrase book.

Steves fills his with the same irreverent, occasionally sophomoric, humor that pervades his phenomenally popular

"Europe Through the Back Door" book. Plus, it has a number of phrases particularly useful to rock-bottom budget travelers, such as Je suis couvert de piqures de punaise: "I'm covered with bug bites."

Ever wonder what to say back to a rude waiter? Try Je voudrais vomir: "I'd like to throw up." Or Avez-vous des clients qui reviennent? Do any of your customers return? If those fail, there is an entire page of handy swear words.

If you run into trouble at customs, there's the always-useful Je n'ai aucune idee comment cela se trouve la: "I have no idea how that got there."

Having an existential crisis in a cafe? Try blurting out Au secours! J'ai perdu ma foi en l'humanite: "Help! I have lost my faith in humanity!"

If at this point the French seem to be edging away and consciously avoiding making any sudden movements around you, you can always turn to barnyard animals. Steves' phrase book notes that roosters don't say

"cock-a-doodle-do" in French. They say cocorico. French birds don't go "tweet tweet." They go cui cui. And French dogs don't woof. They ouah ouah. Useful stuff if no one else will talk to you.

Lonely Planet's USA phrase book is aimed at travelers from Britain, Australia and other countries that are, in the purported words of George Bernard Shaw, divided from the U.S. by a common tongue.

Flipping through it, I was impressed by the rich, almost bewildering variety of regional slang. I never knew, for example, that in Kentucky, "Dick Miller" is an all-purpose adjective. "Oh, Dick Miller," for example, means "oh, what the heck." Or that "George" signifies good and "Tom" bad.

If you were in Boston and someone said they were "going to the packy" would you have any idea what they were talking about? It means they're headed to the liquor store, which is called a "package store" in Massachusetts.

"Wicked" is an all-purpose Boston adjective meaning

"very" - as in "wicked funny," "wicked scary" or

"wicked drunk."

From one side of Los Angeles comes the term AMW,

"actress, model, whatever," used to describe a babe without an apparent career. From the other side of town comes the chilling verb "prone-out," which means to get down on the ground, face down, when ordered to do so by the

LAPD.

When I got to the San Francisco section, though, I began to have some doubts. It gets some things right - "Dusty" is universally taken to refer to Giants skipper Dusty Baker, whom the book correctly calls "the most progressive manager in baseball" and "a local treasure." "Joe" might mean coffee everywhere else in the U.S., but as the book points out, in The City it almost exclusively means a revered former 49ers quarterback. And it correctly notes that "the wall" is the bike-messenger term for their hangout at Sansome and Market.

But do we really say "right on?" The book assures us it's

"back in style in The City." Do we actually call policemen "Johnnies?" Is "sniveler" truly an S.F. term for "slacker?" Does anybody except the book's authors refer to the Examiner Bay to Breakers as "Bonnie Baker?"

Oh well. Any time you try to capture something as fleeting and ephemeral as slang, you're bound to perpetrate a few ghastly floaters. If that's what I mean.

Meanwhile, the next time my head is spinning from Portuguese I can't understand, I'll just ask them to direct me to the nearest packy.&lt;